Archive for September, 2014

Science Fiction Film and Television seeks submissions for a special issue on “Star Trek at 50.”

Since its premiere on September 8, 1966, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek has become shorthand for liberal optimism about the future, even as the franchise’s later entries have moved towards increasingly dark depictions of aging (ST II-VII), war (DS9), lifeboat ethics (VOY), and post-9/11 securitization (ENT). This internal tension has now culminated in the rebooted “Abramsverse” depiction that — while nominally directed towards reinvigorating the franchise by returning it to its youthful origins— has seen the Spock’s home planet of Vulcan destroyed by terrorists (ST) and the Federation itself corrupted by a coup from its black-ops intelligence wing (STID).

Articles of 6,000-9,000 words should be formatted using MLA style and according to the submission guidelines available on our website. Submissions should be made via our online system at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com:80/lup-sfftv. Articles not selected for the special issue will be considered for future issues of SFFTV.Any question should be directed to the editors, Mark Bould (mark.bould@gmail.com), Sherryl Vint (sherryl.vint@gmail.com), and Gerry Canavan (gerrycanavan@marquette.edu). The deadline for submissions is September 1, 2015, with anticipated publication in Star Trek’s 50th anniversary year.

Science Fiction Film and Television is a peer-reviewed journal published three times a year by Liverpool University Press. Edited by Mark Bould (UWE), Gerry Canavan (Marquette) and Sherryl Vint (UC RIverside), with an international board of advisory editors, it encourages dialogue among the scholarly and intellectual communities of film studies, sf studies and television studies. We invite submissions on all areas of sf film and television, from Hollywood productions to Korean or Turkish sf film, from Sci-Fi Channel productions to the origins of SF TV in Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers or The Quatermass Experiment. We encourage papers which consider neglected texts, propose innovative ways of looking at canonical texts, or explore the tensions and synergies that emerge from the interaction of genre and medium. We publish articles (6000-8000 words), book and DVD reviews (1000-2000 words) and review essays (up to 5000 words), as well as archive entries (up to 5000 words) on theorists (which introduce the work of key and emergent figures in sf studies, television studies or film studies) and texts (which describe and analyse little-known or unduly neglected films or television series).

JOY DEVOTION:
The Importance of Ian Curtis and fan culture CFP
New book to be released exclusively on Headpress
Joy Devotion: The Importance of Ian Curtis and fan culture in a 2.0 Economy will explore the lasting legacy in the fan, post-punk and dot com economy of Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis, and what such dedication says about the larger issues facing us in a modern world. Essays on Curtis, exploring ideas of memory, death, technology, fandom and secular religion will be complimented by photos taken at the Ian Curtis Memorial Stone every month for a year, beginning fall 2009 through 2010. Stakeholders in the Curtis legacy, from fans to artists, will also contribute their personal insights, allowing for intimate and never before allowed access to the very people who Curtis has continued to influence and inspire long past his untimely death in 1980.
We are looking for contributions in the following areas:
• The growing importance of Joy Division and Curtis since his death
• Bootlegs, bootleg culture and ideas of duplication, replication and distribution;
• On-line communities, social media and the evolution of fan connection via technology
• Joy Division tribute bands and or acts
•Ideas of Englishness as exported via Joy Division to the rest of the world
• How the images of Joy Division and Ian Curtis have played a role in memory, history and iconography
• Military and political messaging in the band’s name, ideals and legacy
• Films about and featuring Joy Division
• The non-touring band- how Joy Division became a global phenomena without international touring
•Memory, fandom and secular religion
Other ideas are welcome. Any questions or inquiries please send to jkomedia@gmail.com.
Please send a 500 word abstract of your ideas to jkomedia@gmail.com by November 1, 2014 for consideration. We will contact all interested parties by February 1, 2015, with a decision in regards to inclusion.
A full chapter will consist of 2,000-3,000 words, and will be due no later than May 1, 2015.

“Modified in the guts of the living”: Victorian Texts in Contemporary Fandoms

In a practice Henry Jenkins famously refers to as “textual poaching,” fans appropriate characters and narratives from canonical texts in order to adapt and rewrite them in novel ways, and for a variety of reasons: artistic, political, communal, financial, emotional, sexual, and other. Contemporary fandoms are vast in scope, multi-platformed, multimedia subcultures which operate via an economy of participation that has typically held itself apart from academic study, while simultaneously being scorned as an ‘illegitimate’ subject of study by the academy. Recently, though, scholars from anthropologists to sociologists and literary theorists have begun to turn their attention to fandom and fanfiction as rich sites of cultural meaning. This attention is often a source of discomfort to the fans themselves, even as a new hybrid, “acafan” attempts to bridge the divide.

Hybridity is the essence of these transformative works. Lev Grossman states, “Fanfiction has become wildly more biodiverse than the canonical works that it springs from. It encompasses male pregnancy, centaurification, body swapping, apocalypses, reincarnation, and every sexual fetish, kink, combination, position, and inversion you can imagine and a lot more that you could but would probably prefer not to. It breaks down walls between genders and genres and races and canons and bodies and species and past and future and conscious and unconscious and fiction and reality” (Forward, Fic).

This diversity includes Victorian texts; in multiple fandoms, fanfiction authors have used Victorian source material as a starting point for writing about characters from literature, television, film and celebrity culture, creating what are called, in fan parlance, “crossovers”. These crossovers address lacunae in both canons, overwriting a broader variety of experience onto each source text.

This panel seeks to explore that variety: the biodiversity of Victorian texts within contemporary fandoms. How are the body of the text and the bodies in the texts altered by fan authors? What does this reveal about the canonical texts, the bodies that inhabit them, the bodies that wrote them, and the bodies that produce and consume them now? How, as W.H. Auden might have put it, are Victorian texts “modified in the guts of the living”?

The panel chairs are looking for contributors a planned panel at the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada 2015 conference in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, on April 10-11 (original cfp here: http://web.uvic.ca/vsawc/vsawc-conferences/2015-conference/). Please submit a 250-word abstract to Elise Mitchell (elise_mitchell@uqac.ca) and/or Elyssa Warkentin (Elyssa.Warkentin@umanitoba.ca) by September 25, 2014.

Edited by Beth Johnson (Keele University) and David Forrest (University of Sheffield)

We invite contributions that explore the stars of the North of England on contemporary British television. Considering and examining the intersections between stardom, Northern places, spaces and identities, the purpose of this dossier is to argue for the existence of a Northern consciousness on television that is characterized through the figure of the Northern star. In particular, this dossier is to explore how the public and private personas of Northern stars are frequently merged when such performers enact or perform Northern characters. Accordingly, we would like to receive proposals for full length articles/case-studies of specific Northern television stars. In particular, we encourage proposals (though proposers are not limited to these) on the following:

Please submit an extended abstract of 500 words to b.l.johnson@keele.ac.uk and d.forrest@sheffield.ac.uk (entitled Northern Stardom), by 30th September 2014. Please also include a brief biographical note.

We plan to complete evaluation of abstracts by the end of October. Those accepted will be asked to submit completed article, to a maximum of 8,000 words, by the end of March 2015. Articles will then be submitted for peer review.

The queer-, trans-, and geek-focused webcomic “Riot Nrrd” once joked about how disorienting it was to be at a geeky convention because there was no way to tell from the attendees’ appearance whether they were queer or just straight nerds. This confusion between identities points toward a much larger convergence of queer and geek cultures. Practices such as cosplay, fanfic (particularly slash), the foundation of homosocial communities (as with gamers) and other forms of geek/fan labor closely resemble those of camp, drag, and what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “reparative reading.” In fact, Sedgwick paves the way for this convergence with her suggestion that “queer” need not necessarily imply gay or lesbian but perhaps does fundamentally refer to shame, stigma, and practices of responding to those feelings with exuberant, performative adventures and deep attachment to cultural objects as resources of self-making and survival—especially in a world inimical to the people who do not conform to its expectations. Non mainstream sexual and gender expression, as well as creative experiments with post-human and other transformative identities or alter-egos, comprise important elements of various geek cultures. Meanwhile, the canard of the “fake geek girl” (like the pejorative “fag,” when applied to nerds and other outsiders in order to emasculate) reveals the deep strains of misogyny—as well as homophobia and white supremacy—that also run through geek culture. We seek papers that theorize queer and geek subcultures, identities, and practices with regard to their intersecting possibilities.

Deadline for abstracts: September 30

According to the new guidelines set by NeMLA, no abstracts will be accepted through email. Instead, interested scholars should submit abstracts through the NeMLA website.

As the popularity of this year’s San Diego Comic Con proved, fan spaces are increasingly important culturally and financially. Media creators and producers have come to acknowledge the significance of their fans and the need to communicate with them, particularly through social media. Fans, however, also insist upon their own self-contained spaces where they can share their opinions and observations, as well as transformative and fan works, without the threat of censorship or harassment. These spaces exist both physically (as in, for example, in the form of fan conventions and fan meet ups) and virtually through social media platforms such as Tumblr, twitter, and Ao3.

I am looking for papers on virtual and physical fan spaces for a panel in the Fan Studies area at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) conference in New Orleans April 1-4, 2015. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

-virtual fan spaces including Tumblr, Archive of our Own, and fanfiction.net
-creating or delineating fan spaces
-physical fan spaces including meetups and fan conventions
-for-profit conventions such as DragonCon or SDCC
-fan run conventions such as Otakon, 221bCon, or GallifreyOne
-policing and harassment in fan spaces
-fan spaces functioning as or failing to function as “safe spaces”
-cosplay and crossplay
-language of fan spaces

Priority will be given to papers that go beyond introductory level treatment of their topics.

Submissions should be sent directly to my email (ejnielsen@northwestern.edu) and should include the author’s CV, short biography (100-150 words), and abstract (100-250 words). If papers are chosen for the panel, they must be submitted to the PCA’s website at http://ncp.pcaaca.org. Please indicate at that time whatever audio/visual needs you may have.

Fan Studies in the Classroom strives to connect the popular with the scholarly, using popular and fan cultural artifacts to engage student interest, motivate student research, and cast a new light on learning objectives. Increasingly, teachers in all disciplines incorporate fan creations, remix concepts, and media studies approaches in the classroom. These exercises range from using fan materials as examples, to having students study remix works, to asking students to rewrite canon.
Instructors from all institutions and serving varieties of student populations are invited to submit abstracts for essays about using remix/fan studies approaches in the classroom, with a focus on practice and instruction. Fan Studies in the Classroom will be an interdisciplinary, edited collection.

University of Iowa Press has expressed interest in publishing the volume. Authors of selected abstracts will be asked to write a 5,000 word essay and invite a student to submit a response to the assignment described.

Abstracts of 250-500 words
Short biographical statement
Current MLA guidelines, please no endnotes.
Submit to Katherine Howell khowell@gwu.edu by December 18, 2014.

POPULAR CULTURE ASSOCIATION
FAN CULTURE AND THEORY
APRIL 1-4, NEW ORLEANS

CALL FOR PAPERS
DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 1, 2014
Proposals for both panels and individual papers are now being accepted for all aspects of Fan Culture and Theory, including, but not limited to, the following areas:

Please submit abstracts of 100-250 words with relevant audio/visual requests online. Click here for instructions.
Panel proposals should include one abstract of 200 words describing the panel,
accompanied by the abstracts (250 words) of the individual papers that comprise the panel. Graduate students are encouraged to submit proposals.
All Proposals & Abstracts Must Be Submitted Through The PCA Database.
Please submit a proposal to only one area at a time. Exceptions and rules

Pages

Welcome!

This blog will feature posts such as CFPs or announcements that scholars may find of interest. If there is anything you think we should feature, please get in touch: our details are on the Who We Are page above.

If you are interested in joining the network, please sign up to our discussion list at http://jiscmail.ac.uk/fanstudies. We hope it will be a fruitful forum, proving useful in terms of making contacts, asking for advice, and sharing ideas.